Who will be the 2026 Canadian athlete of the year?

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On Tuesday, NBA star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won the Northern Star Award as Canada’s athlete of the year for the second time, beating out swimming phenom Summer McIntosh in a vote by sports-media people from around the country.

They made the right call. During this calendar year, Gilgeous-Alexander completed one of the best seasons ever by an NBA player, sweeping the regular-season and Finals MVP awards, winning the scoring title and capturing his first championship with the Oklahoma City Thunder. And SGA has continued to dominate this season, powering OKC to a 23-1 record while leading the league in points per possession and ranking second in points per game behind Lakers gunner Luka Doncic, who has played far more minutes (the Thunder have been blowing out their opponents so routinely that SGA has played in the fourth quarter just 11 times in his 24 games).

Still, we shouldn’t just gloss over what McIntosh accomplished this year.

At the Canadian trials in June, the 18-year-old sensation became the first swimmer since Michael Phelps at the 2008 Beijing Olympics to break three different individual world records at the same meet. At the ensuing world championships in Singapore, McIntosh set an audacious goal of matching Phelps’ record of five solo gold medals. She came very close, winning four golds in her 200-400m comfort zone and taking bronze in the 800m freestyle — a distance she picked up just a few months earlier so she could challenge American star Katie Ledecky (the only other woman to win four golds at a single worlds) in her signature race. In the 200m butterfly, McIntosh came within 0.18 of a second of matching what was once considered an untouchable world record set by China’s Liu Zige during the time-warping supersuit era.

Most years, that’s more than enough to win you the Northern Star. The fact that McIntosh didn’t is a testament to Gilgeous-Alexander’s greatness.

SGA and Summer have now traded the Northern Star back and forth for the last three years. Gilgeous-Alexander won it in 2023 after placing fifth in NBA MVP voting and leading the Canadian men’s national team to its first Olympic berth in a quarter century and an historic bronze at the Basketball World Cup. McIntosh got it last year after winning three Olympic golds and a silver in Paris.

Can they keep this duopoly going? Well, Gilgeous-Alexander looks like he’ll be in the running again next year as he’s still playing like a top MVP candidate while the Thunder seem poised to repeat as NBA champions and maybe break the regular-season wins record. But no one has won back-to-back Northern Star/Lou Marsh Awards since Ben Johnson in 1986 and ’87, and the only athletes to win it more than twice in their lives are Wayne Gretzky (4) and figure-skating great Barbara Ann Scott (3). Johnson would have joined them in 1988, but, you know.

It’ll be tougher for McIntosh because there’s no Summer Olympics or swimming world championships in 2026. The closest things to a major competition that she can enter are the Commonwealth Games and Pan Pacific Championships in the summer and the short-course world championships in December.   

So, who else has a good chance to win the Northern Star next year?

If history has taught us anything, it’s that it’ll probably be a Winter Olympian. Canada is expected to win a lot of medals at the Games in northern Italy this February and, in the 13 Olympic years so far this century, the Northern Star/Lou Marsh has gone to an Olympic athlete in 12 of them. The only exception, ironically, was in 2010, when Canada had its best Winter Olympics ever in Vancouver but baseball star Joey Votto got the Lou Marsh after winning the National League MVP award.

Barring a non-Olympic athlete stealing the show — maybe, say, Alphonso Davies when Canada co-hosts the World Cup this summer — here are some top candidates for next year’s Northern Star:

Connor McDavid: One of the best athletes never to win the award (Gordie Howe and Andre De Grasse are on the list too), McDavid has a golden opportunity (literally) coming up at his first Olympic Games. If he helps Canada re-capture the men’s gold medal and then leads the Edmonton Oilers to a Stanley Cup victory, just go ahead and mail him the trophy. But McDavid might not even need the Oilers piece if he comes up big at the Olympics — like he did this year by scoring the OT winner in the final of the heated 4 Nations Face-Off against the rival United States.

Will Dandjinou: He’s not exactly a household name at the moment, but the short-track speed skating star is a good bet to be Canada’s leading medal-winner at his first Olympics. Dandjinou, 24, has dominated his sport over the last two years, capturing back-to-back men’s overall titles on the short track World Tour and winning gold in seven of his 12 individual races this season. Including relays, he has a chance to win five Olympic medals, which would match long-track skater Cindy Klassen’s Canadian single-Games record (winter or summer).

Rachel Homan: One of the best potential stories of 2026 would be Homan slaying her Olympic demons to win gold in curling. She shockingly missed the playoffs as the reigning women’s world champion skip in 2018, then failed to advance again four years later in mixed doubles with John Morris. But, with her revamped four-person team, Homan is now better than ever, going undefeated at the last two Scotties Tournament of Hearts and winning back-to-back world titles.

Marie-Philip Poulin: Canada’s incomparable women’s hockey captain won the Northern Star in 2022 after scoring a pair of goals to defeat the archrival United States in the gold-medal game in Beijing, making her the only player ever (woman or man) to score in four Olympic finals. Poulin needs just two goals to break Hayley Wickenheiser’s all-time record for the most goals in Olympic women’s hockey, and at 34 she’s still playing at an extremely high level, leading the PWHL in goals last season and winning the league’s MVP award.